Lee Malkow knows that online predators are out there.
As a detective with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, she poses as a 13-year-old girl in chat rooms and online sites, waiting for predators to contact her.
Malkow talked to parents at Jackson High School the night of Tuesday, Jan. 29, about online predators and ways to keep kids safe.
When she poses online as a teen, Malkow doesn’t use a sexual chat name and doesn’t initiate talk about sex.
“With me putting myself out there as an innocent, about 50 percent of the time I’m approached sexually,” she said.
In that role, she gets sent a lot of sexually explicit pictures. Men start talking to her in sexually explicit language, sometimes after a while and sometimes after just a few lines of chat.
“People ask me to do things in front of a Web cam — they do things in front of a Web cam,” Malkow said.
Sometimes, the men initiate a meeting for sex. That’s when Malkow and her team show up at the meeting spot and arrest him.
Malkow’s first arrest was a 56-year-old man she met while pretending to be a 13-year-old girl online.
In real life, the perpetrator was a grief counselor.
He used his counseling skills to play into Malkow’s fake teen angst. When they agreed to meet for sex, the man showed up and was arrested.
A search of his car turned up a butcher knife and other tools that showed clear intent to rape the girl.
He went to prison.
In a nationwide study, 32 percent of teens said they’d been contacted online by a stranger. The study, called “Teens’ Privacy and Online Social Networks,” was done in April 2007 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
And for those who want it, personal information is easy to track down online.
Tuesday night, Malkow showed a five-minute video called “Tracking Teresa” that showed, in real time, searching an online site to find personal information about teens.
Within five minutes, a search of posted chat messages by one teen user turned up her home phone number, the time she’s most likely to be home, the time her mother gets home and her mother’s name. A reverse phone look up brought up her address and directions to her home.
A little more research showed what schools were closest to her.
Because Malkow knows the risks, she’s spent a lot of time and energy monitoring what her teen daughters do online.
It hasn’t been easy. The back-and-forth struggle has included several blow-ups, and in the end Malkow banned one of her daughters from any Internet use at all. That was after she got herself into a dangerous situation that Malkow didn’t give specifics on.
“It was exhausting,” she said.
She has tips for parents to help them monitor their child’s use.
She recommends monitoring software over blocking software, as the latter is easy to get around. But even with monitoring software, parents should sit down and see what their child is doing, regularly. They should also talk to them about it.
Malkow recommends talking with children about what information is OK to post online and where.
“With my girls, it was no no no no no,” said Malkow, describing how she told her daughters to post nothing personal online at first. “That works great when they’re 10 years old, but not when they’re older.”
Since many teens communicate through social networking sites like MySpace.com, teens will likely go behind your back if you tell them to post no personal information, Malkow said.
Instead, make sure that all the settings on their MySpace account are set to “private.” This can be done by editing the user preferences.
Also make sure they don’t post information like a last name, age, school, address, phone number and the like, on their main page.
Many teens do give out this information, according to the study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Twenty-nine percent of teens said they put their last names online, and 49 percent gave the name of their school.
Posting photos has been an issue in the Malkow household. As a compromise, the public photo on the main page of her daughter’s MySpace account is the family dog. Once inside the private page, she can post photos.
Studies — and a search of the Internet — show that girls tend to post more sexual photos of themselves, Malkow said.
MySpace can be private and safe, Malkow said, if the account is set to private. That means only the child’s friends can see it.
The problem comes in keeping track of who the friends are. Children get messages all the time asking to add them as a friend, and they don’t know all of them personally, Malkow said.
To solve that problem, Malkow has gone through her daughter’s MySpace.com friends one at a time, asking how she knew them and what was their last name.
MySpace also is often hacked, but there’s nothing one can do about that, Malkow said.
Malkow also suggests keeping the computer in an open space in the house and setting time limits.
She will come around a corner and say “Hands up!”, then sit down and see what her daughter is doing online.
“I was getting tired of all the minimizing going on,” she said.
At the end of the talk, she said that teens need to know computers in order to survive in the modern world.
“I don’t want to discourage you from using the Internet because this is the world now,” she said.
“It’s not gonna change.”
Tanya and Tim Labrensz were two parents who attended the event. Their daughter, Ariana Paynter, 13, came with them.
They came because Paynter is about to get a MySpace account.
“We figured if we could work on some prevention and risk on the Internet, that would be great,” Tanya Labrensz said.
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